CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CHALLENGE WINNERS!

On January 20, 2016, USAID announced the Prize Winners for the Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge. These 16 Winners presented exceptional innovations, distinguishing themselves from a talented pool of 300 applicants from 52 countries. Prize Winners will receive $10,000 and technical assistance to further their solutions, in addition to a chance to apply for a Grand Prize of $500,000.

SEE WINNING SOLUTIONS THAT:

Detect Transit Routes

StrengthenForensic Evidence

ReduceConsumer Demand

TackleCorruption

Detect Transit Routes

Detect Transit Routes Winners

Photo Credit: USAID

Enforcement Gaps Interface

Jennifer Jacquet, USA

Science and Tech Type: Data Mining and Analysis

Enforcement Gaps Interface (EGI) uses data science on a massive scale to identify gaps in enforcement in the internet wildlife trade. Over the next year, the EGI team will build and use a computational model that mines nearly a hundred commercial sites for CITES Appendix I-listed fauna (699 species of protected wildlife). Law enforcement will be able to access and analyze the resulting data via a password-protected interface.

The Problem: organizations hoping to end the internet trade in illegal wildlife, including wildlife law-enforcement agencies, are often underfunded and struggle to meet the challenge of monitoring the emerging global digital wildlife marketplace.

The Team: Jennifer Jacquet is an Assistant Professor in New York University’s (NYU) Department of Environmental Studies. She conceived of this project with Sunandan Chakraborty, who recently received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU. An undergraduate research assistant is compiling common and market names for CITES Appendix I species.

The Realtime Global Platform for Mapping, Forecasting, and Network Assessment of Wildlife Crime will use the GDELT Project, which monitors, codifies, and translates global news reporting, to track media reports of wildlife crime in 65 languages in real time. The platform will include a live map that visualizes the current state of wildlife crime worldwide, highlights emerging trends and breaking situations to allow real time intervention, and identifies key influencers and transport corridors and their vulnerabilities.

The Problem: previous attempts to leverage news reports to study wildlife crime have focused primarily on English-language news. However, the majority of wildlife crime reporting tends to happen at the local level, and understanding such events requires detailed socio-cultural contextualization from sources such as academic literature archives.

The Team: GDELT Founder Kalev Leetaru is a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security, and was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2013.

Paso Pacifico plans to construct artificial sea turtle eggs that contain covert GSM-GPS tracking devices. These will be placed in nests at high risk of poaching. Once the eggs are poached, their movement can be monitored and mapped, revealing trafficking routes.

The Problem: poachers regularly steal and sell the eggs of four sea turtle species that nest on Central American beaches: Leatherback; Hawksbill; Green; and Olive Ridley. However, little is known about the transit routes that poachers use or where the stolen eggs end up.

The Team: project leader Dr. Kim Williams-Guillen directs Paso Pacifico’s conservation science program and is a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan.

Instant Detect: Exposing the movement of poachers in real-time

Zoological Society of London, UK

Science and Tech Type: Sensing and Remote Sensing

Instant Detect comprises a range of military grade sensors that use satellite technology to enable data transfer in near real time. Instant Detect hopes to help authorities immediately identify illegal activity such as poaching and smuggling in protected areas both on land and at sea.

The Problem: criminal syndicates increasingly target protected wildlife areas to poach wildlife. However, the managers of these areas often have few resources, and are in critical need of innovative solutions to help detect and monitor poaching routes.

The Team: Instant Detect is led by the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Conservation Technology Program. The project team includes Conservation Technology Lead Sophie Maxwell; Technical specialist Alasdair Davies; Project Manager Louise Hartley; and Field Specialist Chris Gordon. ZSL is a member of the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) Partnership.

e-Eye® is an innovative combination of hardware and software that provides around-the-clock, all weather ‘live feed’ wildlife surveillance. e-Eye will help to secure parks and other protected areas by enabling: surveillance of inaccessible areas; trend analysis; intrusion detection; patrol management; and corruption prevention.

The Problem: Binomial Solutions sought to design a surveillance solution that would be: effective at night and in adverse weather; capable of converting real-time data into actionable information; and capable of generating an alert before a wildlife-related crime takes place rather than after such crimes have already been committed.

The Team: Binomial Solutions is a leading IT solutions and service provider. The team is led by CEO Ravikant Singh and CTO Raja Brij Bhushan.

Photo Credit: Bosque Antiguo and Fatma Escalante

High throughput short tandem repeat sequence genotyping as a forensic tool for the protection of species

Bosque Antiguo, Mexico

Science and Tech Type: DNA Analysis or Databases

Bosque Antiguo plans to create highly accurate forensic tools that can identify the Scarlet Macaw, the Military Macaw, and the Red-Eyed Tree Frog at both the individual and species level in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. These tools will be used to provide evidence to prosecute criminals.

The Problem: Mexico’s Scarlet Macaw, Military Macaw, and Red-Eyed Tree Frog have suffered dramatic declines in their natural ranges due to illegal trade. Although reintroduction is underway, new forensic tools may help ensure that re-established populations do not fall victim to illegal trade.

The Team: Patricia Escalante is a lead researcher at the Institutio de Biología of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IB UNAM). Noemi Matias, also of IB UNAM, oversees the genetic analysis of Scarlet Macaw. Jonathan Contreras is a biology student with experience in avian genetics.

The JIGZAW Information Collaboration Project

Mars Omega Partnership Ltd, UK

Science and Tech Type: Database Solutions

JIGZAW is a web-based application designed to store, process, and share information about any aspect of the illegal wildlife trade including actors, methods, and trafficking routes. This solution is designed to help conservancies and other protected areas process information and make appropriate decisions, and has been successfully implemented in Kenya to capture information about elephant and rhino poaching.

The Problem: in many developing countries, conservancies and protected areas lack the capacity to safely store and process data and share information securely among relevant networks and conservancies. An easy to use web-based database system offers a solution in low-capacity environments.

The Team: Mars Omega, an information-gathering corporation, provides enhanced access to information to enable decision-making and owns the JIGZAW software. A number of Mars Omega’s managers have been involved in the project: Chris Holtom is JIGZAW’s designer and project manager for the knowledge repositories and databases; Hamish Macdonald designed JIGZAW’s influence-planning engine; Anthony Franks is responsible for managing and controlling the extensive information networks.

The New England Aquarium (NEAq) has developed a system that digitizes wildlife trade invoices in real time, checks reported species against lists of illegal wildlife, and analyzes shipping values like size and weight to find discrepancies between reported and real cargoes. NEAq plans to expand this system by creating a tablet-based platform linking species identification to invoices.

The Problem: illegal wildlife trafficking is often hidden in legal, documented trade. Inspectors must manually sort through piles of paper to deal with high-volume, time-sensitive transactions, which provides openings in which traffickers can operate. A real-time system that rapidly analyzes these data will help prevent illegal trade from hiding in plain sight.

Planet Indonesia, a nonprofit, plans to create a mobile app that enables users to easily and inconspicuously collect data in Indonesian bird markets. While pretending to send a text, users can collect standardized data on species, price, and origin, and even view images to identify bird species. Collected data will be stored in a central database for access by appropriate parties.

The Problem: data collection in wildlife markets in Indonesia, while difficult and dangerous, enables researchers to track the wildlife trade and identify species that are declining in the wild. Currently, field staff have just minutes to collect data on hundreds of species, which requires that they have extensive training on bird identification and market monitoring techniques.

The Team: Adam Miller is the director of Planet Indonesia and a research fellow at the Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Universal species identification in the field by rapid and affordable nanopore DNA sequencing

University of Leicester, UK

Science and Tech Type: DNA Analysis or Databases

The University of Leicester aims to pilot a hand-held nanopore DNA sequencer. The project’s goal is to fully automate DNA sequencing and species identification at a crime scene in approximately one hour rather than days.

The Problem: determining species of origin from biological samples is often achieved by DNA sequencing, reading ‘barcode’ genes, which differ in DNA sequence between species. Sequencing is typically performed in a laboratory with expensive equipment, relying on complex manual stages to prepare the DNA. The capability to identify a poached or trafficked species at the crime scene would enable rapid detection of a crime.

The Team: The University of Leicester is a pioneer of DNA fingerprinting and University researcher and project leader Jon Wetton has 30 years of experience in the application of non-human forensic profiling. He leads a team of three Ph.D. students, a technician, and a forensic quality manager.

Internationalization of RhODIS® and eRhODISTM as benchmark forensic tools to combat wildlife crime

University of Pretoria, South Africa

Science and Tech Type: DNA Analysis or Databases

The DNA- and IT-based Rhino DNA Indexing System (RhODIS®) and Electronic Rhino DNA Indexing System (eRhODISTM) provide forensic tracing for African rhinoceroses and their parts (including horns), linking parts back to source animals and criminals to specific crimes. The project aims to increase its impact through development and validation of an internationally available rhinoceros nuclear DNA analysis kit.

The Problem: although adopted by all the African Rhinoceros Range States, RhODIS® has received samples from less than 50 percent of media-reported horn seizures. DNA samples collected are frequently of varying quality, held up by red tape, or face chain-of-custody issues. An international system that standardizes DNA and data-collection processes and facilitates delivery to forensic testing labs may help authorities better monitor illegal trade involving rhinos.

The Team: RhODIS is led by the University of Pretoria’s Veterinary Genetics Laboratory. The team includes a chief analyst, six technicians, two administrative staff members, a systems developer, and a quality manager.

The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) plans to develop a portable electronic ‘nose’ that uses smell ‘fingerprints’ to identify wildlife and wildlife parts on-site and determine their origin. Since it can be used in the field, the solution could help authorities prosecute offenders and trace trafficking routes.

The Problem: a major trafficking enforcement issue is the lack of a rapid and accurate method to distinguish legal from illegal wildlife parts; even dogs trained to detect threatened wildlife parts cannot provide species-level wildlife identification.

Photo Credit: University of Washington Center for Conservation Biology

High throughput methods for locating source populations in the illegal wildlife trade

University of Washington, USA

Science and Tech Type: DNA Analysis or Databases

The University of Washington’s solution combines genetic analysis, detector dogs, and assignment software to identify the geographic origin of seized pangolins and alert law enforcement to the most heavily poached populations.

The Problem: pangolins are among the world’s most heavily trafficked mammals and methods to locate poaching hotspots are urgently needed. With eight known pangolin species distributed over two continents and more than 35 countries, knowledge of these hotspots would more efficiently direct law enforcement to the most significant poaching areas.

The Team: Sam Wasser is the director of the University of Washington’s Center For Conservation Biology, which aims to develop and apply noninvasive field, lab, and analytical methods to inform wildlife policy.

YIARI aims to build a genetic database for slow lorises, which can be used to identify species and geographic origin of confiscated animals, map trade and poaching hotspots, provide information in criminal cases, and provide recommendations to the Indonesian government to update laws protecting this genus.

The Problem: the trade in slow lorises is complex and little is known about the location of hunting areas and the numbers being harvested. Open trade persists in Indonesian markets owing to the high demand for slow lorises as pets. These animals are harvested from the wild by specialist or opportunistic hunters and then sold by the hunters themselves or middlemen in Indonesian pet markets. While protected, Indonesian slow lorises are threatened by the illegal wildlife trade and taxonomic uncertainty complicates law enforcement.

Reduce Consumer Demand

Reduce Consumer Demand Winners

Photo Credit: For the Fishes

Tank Watch: The Good Fish / Bad Fish Tool for Saltwater Aquariums

For the Fishes, USA

Science and Tech Type: Digital Media Campaign

Tank Watch is a mobile app that enables global consumers to easily identify popular aquarium species and distinguish those potentially bred in captivity and thus coral-reef friendly from those definitely wild-caught, possibly with cyanide or other harmful practices. This solution aims to reduce demand by developing consumer awareness.

The Problem: most people are unaware that 98 percent of the species displayed in saltwater tanks cannot yet be bred in captivity. Up to 70 percent of the fish in the Marine Aquarium Trade have been captured using cyanide, an illegal poisonous chemical and stunning agent. This amounts to tens of millions of coral reef fish. And cyanide weakens and kills both target and non-target wildlife including fish, corals, and other invertebrates. Cyanide is widely used in the Philippines and Indonesia, which are, by far, the largest wildlife exporters in the trade.

The Team: For the Fishes (FTF) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable organization committed to addressing the trade in coral reef wildlife for the aquarium hobby.

The National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) plans to create a powerful worldwide, multilingual online platform for educating stakeholders and whistleblowers about wildlife whistleblower legislation. The solution will enable whistleblowers to confidentially access information about their rights, and offer them a secure and confidential reporting process, including legal counsel.

The Problem: monetary rewards are a powerful tool to encourage ‘insiders’ to come forward with high-quality tips. Several U.S wildlife laws, including the Lacey Act, require payment of rewards to whistleblowers whose information leads to successful enforcement actions. However, potential whistleblowers are often unaware of these laws or how to use them. A worldwide reporting system that both increases awareness of these laws and provides assistance in leveraging them may increase reporting of wildlife crimes.

The Team: the NWC is an organization that specializes in protecting whistleblowers. The project will be led by Stephen Kohn, who will be joined by: technology manager Mary Jane Wilmoth; security manager Bassem Youssef; and wildlife, fisheries, and biodiversity advisor and NWC chair Dr. Gina Green.

Solution Partners: the National Wildlife Federation’s John Kostyack; Deputy Chief of Party for Ecofish Mar Guidote; and technology expert Swapan Mehra.

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This website is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge is supported by USAID's Forestry and Biodiversity Office under Contract #AID-OAA-C-14-00182 with Integra Government Services International LLC, with subcontractor support from PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector LLP and Sonjara, Inc. The information provided on this website is not official U.S. government information and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of USAID, the U.S. government, National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, or TRAFFIC, or supporting subcontractors. Read our full Security & Privacy Policy.